Perl is a programming language that was first made to change text files. The programming language has been changed many times to do things in addition to changing text files. Some of things are tasks like making web pages show information in a better way than before, or take information and show it in a way that makes more sense to people. Sometimes Perl code is written using many symbols besides letters and numbers, which can make those programs hard to read.

A lot of web pages are written using Perl, but it can be used to do all kinds of things on computers. It is very good at searching through text looking for patterns, which lets people find words that they may be looking for, or also let people find words they are looking for, and change them with different words much more quickly than they would if they had to do it one word at a time.